Category: Film

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Katy, Rosie, and Ann

How sad to hear that Katy Jurado and Rosemary Clooney died this week. But cheer up San Francisco, Ann Miller (!!!) is going to be at the Castro this month to introduce a screening of Kiss Me Kate in 3D!!! Oh my God! I mean, oh my ANN MILLER!! She is truly a screen goddess, descending into my little neighborhood to be worshiped by her faithful and adoring homo followers.

And her dog’s name is COCO!…

Modern man is not for me,
the movie star and dapper Dan,
give me the healthy Joe from ages ago,
a prehistoric man.

And we have the same taste in men!

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The Report on Minority Report

I actually enjoyed a Steven Spielberg movie tonight. His films have definitely improved since the degree. Actually, I decided to just give in and get taken for that same rollercoaster ride, but to stop expecting so much, like intellectual rigor or intense social analysis, and just enjoy being dazzled and manipulated. Plus it was on the IMAX screen. The effects were just stunning, really stunning. At the beginning of the film, during the 20 minutes or so of exposition necessary to tell us everything with words that he had just shown us with images, he accompanies the action with classical music and I couldn’t help but think of Kubrick, the genius of Kubrick’s use of music in, well, in all of his films, but particularly in 2001, where the images are given depth and impact by the choice of music. Spielberg’s vision is that of Capra without a convincing myth and Ford without existential grandeur.

But thumbs up.

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One Meatball

Scooby Doo last night, and awful Italian at Buca di Beppo (“Why did I do it?” I ask myself following every dreadful meal I’ve ever had there) with Bob and Reese.

One meatball for the three of us.

I haven’t seen BC for two days and am missing him. I’m thinking of extending my Thundercrack! piece into a series–fewer images, less structural rigidity. I’d better get into the darkroom. BC’s legs!… more later.

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Olympia and Spidie

Olympia Dukakis Friday night with Bob, in Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again at ACT. The two-person play, which got a little sentimental in the second half, and yes okay I got all weepy, was completely entertaining. The sentiment even evolved into this magical over-the-top ending where the playwright re-imagines his mother’s death as a Technicolor sendoff in a winged balloon. Prior to her sendoff, Dukakis marvels at the beautiful landscape she finds herself in, and then she wanders behind the scenery and remarks about how ugly it all looks from the other side. Her son replies that it’s made to be viewed from our–the audience’s–perspective. It was theater that wavered between artifice and acknowledgment, fantasy and memory.

I finally saw Spiderman yesterday. Tobey is such a cutie-pie, and the effects are dizzying. Reese tried to climb the walls of the bathroom when we got home.

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Distractions

Last week Jane Delynn stayed over for a few days. She was in town reading from her new Semiotexte book, Leash, which promises to be a fun read. Degradation and submission, oh my! She has a motherly butch look, and the cutest little girly giggle. And then Robert Flynt flitted into town to speak at Camerawork and crash my guest pad. He’s in a show called “Everyman: A Search for the Male Form,” in which I am noticeably not. The same tired old hairless muscular young body is the subject of the mostly insipid and utterly drab work in the show. And then there’s the intelligent and beautiful work of master collagist John O’Reilly and Robert’s surreal and ethereal little gems to steal, if not save, the show. Robert and I traded two images each, and I am a happy little camper. Mysteriously, Camerawork called me today to ask for slides for consideration of including my work in an upcoming show on intimacy and erotics–right up my furry alley. Thank you Robert! Okay, so I get off the phone with Camerawork, and there’s a message on my voice mail from RJ, the curator of the AC at the PotLoH. Okay, so I call back and leave a nervous as all get out message–I think I forgot to say my name, but I’ll call back tomorrow and find out what the deal is. And yes, I would trade my soul to be in that collection.

I photographed the assmaster’s masterful ass a few days ago for my Thundercrack! grid, but need to arrange yet another photo session. It seems that I need to make a white “Y” out of his thighs and lower leg to get this thing to work. Hmmmmm…

Movies this week included Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Cockettes, both fab films. Y Tu.. was one of those movies that you wait years for. I’m not going to tell you anything about it, except drop what you’re doing and see it right now. The Cockettes, was equally enjoyable (plus my friend, David Weissman made it), and it left me yearning for fabulousness. After seeing it you’ll want to drop acid, put some glitter in your beard and spin like a dervish in your grandmother’s blue chiffon.

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The Big Night, 1951

I’ve been thinking about this Joseph Losey film, The Big Night, from 1951, starring John Barrymore, Jr. (Drew’s dad). It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so I’m thinking of just one scene (well, and one thing the dad tells his son, “Sometimes a man loves one woman in the whole world. If she turns out to be the wrong one, well…that’s just tough”). Okay, so the big night in question is the 17th birthday of Barrymore, Jr. He sees his father brutally and very publicly beaten, and spends the rest of the film seeking his father’s attacker, intent on revenge. His passage through the night and what it reveals becomes an allegorical passage into adulthood. The scene that I’ve been thinking of is the scene where the dad gets beaten up. He is forced to take off his shirt–he’s a big powerful man, and hairy–and he acquiesces to the beating with no resistance. His vulnerability and shame are intensified by his nakedness. Typically, body hair, and particularly chest hair had been used in films of that time to connote a kind of monsterish masculinity, yet in this film, it is used to enhance nakedness and vulnerability. It was one of the turning points in my development as an artist, to see how metaphorically charged the hairy male body can be.

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My Work Week, Mademoiselle

Another tough day at the office today–I had to work until 12:30 this afternoon, 30 minutes overtime. I don’t see how people work more than 3 hours a week. I said to my boss on leaving, “Have a nice weekend,” which caused him to stop for a moment to consider if it weren’t indeed Tuesday afternoon. My weekend starts on Tuesday afternoon and ends Monday evening. (My work schedule is like Edina Monsoon’s.) I work for a landscape designer, who is also one of my oldest and dearest friends. He’s from a long line of California gardeners, so his connection to the landscape is very deep. We worked together as gardeners for a while, but then he got to be an überdesigner and turned the maintenance route over to me. I missed our gossiping/philosophizing/girltalk sessions so much that I decided to run his office and put the farmer tan behind me. So we get to spend 3 hours together on Tuesday, for which I get paid a ridiculous amount of money, talking about his rent boys, my boyfriend, Thom Gunn, my boyfriend, his getting older, my getting older, Hedy Lamarr, etc. I love my job. It also allows me to spend the rest of the week being an artist.

Last night I watched the sumptuously photographed modernist masterpiece Mademoiselle, directed by Tony Richardson(!), with a screenplay by Margueritte Duras(!!) from a story by Jean Genet(!!!). Jeanne Moreau(!!!!) stars as a schoolteacher/spinster in a small French village who lusts for an Italian lumberjack and so, because this is Genet, has to destroy him. She accidentally starts a fire by dropping her cigarette into a haystack that she’s hiding behind. After witnessing the shirtless lumberjack’s bravery in the ensuing inferno, she starts more fires–she even wears special attire (stiletto heels and fishnet gloves) to the burnings. Everything is fetishised, and because this is Genet, it’s not subtle. Sometimes a pipe IS a penis, and in this case it’s a snake(!) that the Italian wears under his shirt. It slithers out from around his waist and up Moreau’s arm… “It won’t hurt you,” he assures here. Well, she eventualy gets to find out for herself when he introduces her to his other snake as they do finally get to it, spending a passion-filled night in the woods, where she kisses his boots, barks like a dog, and has the time of her life before returning to the village, where the villagers don’t know what to make of her tattered clothes. They assume she’s been raped, and when asked “Did he do this to you?” she replies “Yes…” and rushes off into her house as the villagers rush off to beat him to death.

Beautiful.

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The Piano Teacher

I just saw The Piano Teacher with Isabelle Huppert–a fascinating film about the first “stab” (see the movie) at love taken by a controlling music teacher who has never experienced any kind of physical or emotional intimacy. She sleeps in the same bed as her mother, from whom she has learned that love is about completely controlling one’s loved one. When a handsome and bright young student shows interest in her, she rejects his ardent advances, handing him a letter with specific instructions about how she wants him to express his love for her–by beating her up and sexually assaulting her. I love the French. Doesn’t it seem like mainstream French film has been slowly mutating into an expensive dialogue-heavy porn flick over the past few years? Anyway, it’s a really great movie. The only way that she could imagine intimacy… oh, I forgot to tell you that her sexual experience is limited to watching porn movies in one of those private video booths at the local porn shop, sniffing the cum-encrusted serviettes left behind by previous occupants… so the only way that she could imagine intimacy, given the complete lack of sensation in her life, is in experiencing something physically and emotionally intense, which in this case means wanting a stocking stuffed down her throat and her tongue forced up his butt. (She didn’t offer an explanation of how this was possible.) There’s a great scene–following the student’s brutal rejection of her generous offer to be humiliated and abused–back in bed with mom, where Huppert hops on MOM (!), trying to kiss her on the lips and elsewhere, crying “Je t’aime, mamma! Je t’aime!” Well, mom isn’t into it. There’s also a nifty hymen-slicing scene… See the movie!